That's not exactly the people Gartner is talking to, they target companies. What they're saying to companies is they don't need to upgrade their in some cases thousands of pc's to this new version. MS don't care if home users upgrade or not the real money is in the selling of licenses to companies. If they get off the upgrade threadmill MS stands to lose a lot of money. And in the meantime competitors get more time to improve their competing products.

And some companies will adopt Vista because it fits with their time scheme for renewing their IT environment.

Do companies really upgrade "all computers at once". In my limited experience, some companies are on a rolling basis - new hires get new computers, with the latest standard installation image, get to keep them for the next 2.5 - 3 years. Then they get new ones, with then-current installation image. In my company, people started to use XP computers only a year, year and half ago. It took that much time until IT considered it necessary and prepared an image based on XP.

With this math, if Vista comes out in 2007, we might not be using it before 2009-2010.